Anyone on the alleged left who would not have traded any of the congresses of the past fifty years for the one that was in office in the summer of 1965 when they passed Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Acts into law is a fool. I doubt that there were many members of that congress who would pass a lefty litmus test of acceptability today, even if they hadn't gotten lied and pressured into supporting the war into Vietnam by the generals and the media. If the anti-war movement had followed the same principles that pressured the congress into adopting those revolutionary acts instead of getting hijacked by the immature play left play-revolutionaries, it would probably have ended a lot sooner.
It wasn't until after I went on line and had a year or two to observe the unedited, unfiltered thinking of lots of lefties of my age cohort and younger that I realized our self-told, self-created PR about ourselves was as much a load of crap as all PR is. The left is as full of jerks and idiots and assholes as the right, it's just that their jerks, idiots and assholes have the backing of domestic, and now foreign, billionaires and the media to enhance their power. That ability to lie themselves into power in the media was handed to them by a bunch of jerks on the alleged left out of "principle".
The history of the American left is a pathetic tale of repeated suckering by self-appointed "real lefts" with a few periods of progress, generally when the "real left" was pushed aside out of necessity. I wonder if one of the reasons for the success of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and early 60s was due to the temporary suppression of the Marxists who had their hands too full to screw it up. Maybe it was in 1956 when Khrushchev as the official head of communism told all of them that a lot of what they'd been assured were anti-Stalinist lies had been true all along. Who knows? At any rate, it was the largely religious civil rights movement that got those laws passed, not those dear old commies. Their only role in the struggle for things such as Medicare and the ACA have been as useful foils for the opponents of them, going back to when the American Medical Association, the doctors cartel, hired Ronald Reagan to call universal healthcare a commie plot. And, guess what, kids, that worked.
In the time I've been online I've seen a lot of idiocy of the kind I saw in the late 1960s and read about in earlier decades, The secular, college educated left doesn't seem to be prone to learn from mistakes or even admit to them. In other words, it is not all that different from any other degree of the non-pathological political scale. And it has its own weakness for the depraved left that the conservatives have for the depraved right. As I said, the only difference in the whole thing is who gets funded and who gets on TV and the radio and the left, other than the embarrassing, discrediting part of it, was pretty much disappeared from those by intent. You could always get some idiot like Ward Churchill or . . . well, name them, who would mouth off to their piddling minute of fame and the wider discrediting of the entire left. Last week, I noticed on a blog deputed to be on the left, where the geezers were gassing on about the injustices done to Ward Churchill, I didn't bother reading why. No doubt they posed appropriately when Trumbo (the movie) was briefly in focus before their attention was drawn to the next thing presented by the media.
If, as expected, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is elected to congress, I predict that even with all her skills and intelligence she will be the focus of the fascists in their attacks on all Democrats. She will also come under attack from factions of the left because she won't be able to single-handedly do anything and, like all politicians, she will have to determine what can be done and what can't, which is as important a consideration in real politics as what you'd like to see done. That is something the play-left-"real left" will never learn because they never seem to learn a thing. She won't be "moving right" she'll have faced the reality that her district isn't characteristic of the entire country. I remember the flack that one of my greatest heroes of the left took in that regard, Shirley Chisholm. If she hasn't read her yet, I would recommend that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez read Shirley Chisholm's books and speeches. She'll get a lot more out of that than anything I've read at the Democratic Socialists of America website.
Update: Look at how today's current, ephemeral, right-wing conman, Jordan Peterson is using the "Marxism" label as a button to push with his cult, today when all of the formerly Marxist communist parties are pretty much giving up any pretense of socialism in favor of mafia-state capitalism, when anyone who is holding a candle for dear old Marx and Engels (who weren't all that dear, when you look at them closely) is committing an act of supremely anachronistic romanticism. Marxism had its real-life test of time and that's what it produced, terror-mafia state capitalism followed by oligarchic mafia state capitalism that stopped pretending to be socialistic and never have had any intention of egalitarian democracy and the just rule of law.
No comments:
Post a Comment